Tim & Mikey stare at a blank laptop screen. Deep thoughts ensue.

Besides helping ourselves to free coffee this past Monday morning, Mikey and I started our day by arriving at Independents Hall in Old City.  I consider it a ground zero of sorts for a lot of movers and shakers in our closely-knit Philadelphia tech scene, which makes it a great location for the interview that took place!

CBS3′s Nicole Brewer arrived to interview us about our involvement with the Fiesta Movement, specifically how social media has changed the way large corporations market their brands & products.

Joined by Gloria Bell, and later on by Sam DeLaGarza (Brand Manager for the Ford Fiesta) as well as our ridiculously fun Geekadelphia-themed 2011 Fiesta, we wrapped an awesome and informative interview on 3rd street.  Check out the Interview HERE!

PS – if anyone make a ringtone of the “Geekadelphia.. yeaaaaa!” audio at the end of the video clip, we are willing to pay you with fancy things.

Black Widow hates Spoilers too!

A few years ago, I used to enjoy spoilers of shows and movies. It wasn’t out of a need to be the first person to know the ending to a film, or the last five minutes of a tv shows finale. I just liked having the information. It’s not like I went around blurting out crucial plot points that some fans may be patiently waiting for. I just enjoyed them every now and then.

Nowadays it’s a whole different ballgame. Spoiling a films ending, such as the after credits sequence to Iron Man 2 (Don’t worry, no spoiler in the article), or revealing the final crucial minutes of a television show has gotten to the point of being silly. There’s no fun in it. Nobody wins anything, except maybe the satisfaction of being the first person outside of the creators of the show/film to know what’s going to happen next. I think our growing impatience with either waiting for a film’s release, or waiting for a tv show to end its season is ultimately ruining the initial impact of going into a film or show with as little information about it as possible.

More after the jump.

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Being a shutterbug and a video guy as well, I found this super interesting. The director of the show House Greg Yaitanes, let this interesting tid-bit out on his twitter earlier this week. Turns out the House season finale which will air May, 17^th will be shot completely with a Canon 5D Mark II.

This sparked quite a conversation with fellow Canon users and the director on his twitter, which I highly suggest you check out if you have any interest at all in photography. Now this is a still camera, but it shoots beautiful HD as well; and while the camera does retail for $2,500, this use on a major network show like House is still pretty unprecedented.

While I am a little upset this is a Canon instead of a Nikon, I find this fascinating nonetheless.  While the HD video shot with DSLRs have been mostly regulated to shorts and more experimental media, its great to see it truly go mainstream. But this is not the first time the Canon 5D Mark II made headlines either; it was also the camera to shoot the first digital presidential portrait of Barak Obama.

Our good friends, the Pennsylvania Jedi, were on NBC’s “The 10! Show” on Monday, February 15th.

If you’ve never heard of the PA Jedi, you can read Dan’s in depth article about them, here. They’re a good group of fun people, and we always enjoy bumping into them at local conventions.

Congrats, guys and gals. We’re proud of you! Check out the video embedded below.

For more information on the PA Jedi, visit their official website.

Don’t live tweet the Lost season premiere tonight.  Nothing good will come of it. You’ll only incur the wrath of the universe if you do. Plus, it would be courteous to those who have avoided any and all sorts of spoilers regarding this final season.  Having said that, if you are trying to avoid any spoilers, avoid twitter and facebook for a few hours tonight. Especially if you happen to live on the west coast.

Just don’t do it.

Lost Season 6 Premieres Tuesday @ 8pm on ABC

It’s no secret that most of the Geekadelphians are diehard BSG fans. Can you blame us? The from the pilot miniseries to the finale, the re-imagined series of Battlestar Galactica has been cited as the crown jewel in a new golden era for SF for our generation. Click the break to read a roundtable review from a few Geekadelphians on Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Pun intended– Jump!

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Tomorrow night Oct. 13 at 10:00pm Starz will be premiering Starz Inside: Zombiemania – part of their Inside series of documentaries on all aspects of entertainment, this time focusing on all aspects zombie – from movies, books to videogames. After all zombies ARE the new vampires. If you have been reading Geekadelphia for any length of time, you are well aware of my fondness for the living impaired and the folks at Starz were nice enough to send me a screener of their documentary to check out. I honestly found this documentary to be not only very informative for new fans of the genre, but very entertaining for hard-core fans(like myself) as well, with enough information to satisfy you no matter what side of the fence your on. With interviews from the likes of Tom Savini(SFX Great), George Romero(Director of the original Night of the Living Dead), Max Brooks (Author of World War Z, whom I interviewed at Wizard World earlier this year as well) and many more I can honestly say this is one of the best documentaries I have seen on the subject to date.

Part of what makes Zombiemania great is the way it approaches the subject matter, while not taking itself too seriously it tries to deliver the facts both in fiction and reality on the subject matter.  From the roots of the zombie, and its origins in voodoo practices, to the Romero flesh eaters and finally to the plague zombies popularized today – we also get an evolution of the zombie in pop-culture from some of the greatest authorities in the genre today. The interviews in the documentary are mixed with footage from some of the greats from White Zombie to Shaun of the Dead all are represented, and some clips kids are not for the squeamish. For a documentary about the living dead, it has a lot of heart. Watching the pioneers of the genre look back on the legacy of their films, and what they eventually became and how they shaped what has come out today was really fun to watch. The interviews are all new and for this documentary proper, which I think lends a different light to some of them. Where we have seen most of these people interviewed on the bonus features of their respected films, it’s nice to see them not restricted to simply talking about one film and talking about the genre as a whole is somewhat refreshing.

More and a trailer after the jump.

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Here we are, friends, in an age where video games have finally become a mainstream form of entertainment. Surely, you’ve caught eye of Tim Schafer‘s appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon where he talked up his next project, Brütal Legend (thank you copy+paste for the umlaut), but for those who haven’t check it out above. Those in the know may want to revel in it just one more time for good measure.

It’s been a long time coming (27+ years to be exact), but finally the games industry has semi-officially come to the forefront of mainstream entertainment. One could argue video games have been mainstream for years, but to have one of the industry’s famed designers appear on a late night talk show as if he were an actor talking up his next film appearance is quite a milestone.

Surely, some of you agree or perhaps you feel differently. Is this an exciting time for you as a gamer or do you feel as if one of your favorite indie bands hit the big time? Well, if the latter is the case for you, at least you can say you liked video games before they were cool. With game designers now getting the movie star treatment, what do you think this could mean for the industry (hint: more cash flow)?

Last week I got the opportunity to have a chat with Jeff Witzke whom you might recognize as the star of House Husbands, the web series I previously reviewed earlier this week on Geekadelphia. Jeff is an actor and writer from Los Angeles, California. Some of Jeff’s most memorable roles include the kidnapper in Jason Reitman’s film Thank You For Smoking, the uber-Hollywood baby talent agent in last season’s Nip/Tuck, and on stage as Brother Brightbee, in the eleven month Los Angeles run of the smash-hit Book Of Liz, by Amy and David Sedaris.

Recently, Jeff just celebrated the world premiere of Reitman’s newest film, Up In The Air, where he has a cameo opposite George Clooney. Jeff will also be in the season premiere of The Mentalist opposite Simon Baker. I had a lot of fun chatting with Jeff about everything from why he decided to produce his own web series to what was his favorite Star Wars film.

Can you tell me a bit about how a your background, and why you decided to become an actor?

I guess my major interest started in high school, my best friend and I always just loved fooling around and making our own home videos. So then we decided to get involved with school plays as well. We both got cast in the various plays, and acting in those really got me into loving acting. I still continued to make home videos for our friends and family, and that really solidified “Oh this is fun, I like doing this!”.

I saw you continued your career in college, on a student produced college sitcom. How was the transition from a college run sitcom to national TV and film?

You know that was actually a fantastic opportunity, because I haven’t since heard of many colleges that have a school sitcom being produced on campus. The great double edge sword of that is, it was student produced, student written and student acted as well. There was little bit of faculty oversight, but they really let us do whatever we wanted so we could learn from our successes and on the other side of it, we learn from our failures as well. So it was a fantastic learning experience, and one of those great exercises in learning by doing. Some of the skills I learned by doing that I completely carried it over to working on professional TV shows. So in some of my acting classes I was proud to say, “Oh I’ve done some sitcom work in my college.” The great thing is that show it’s called The Show at Michigan State is still being produced today, 20 years later it’s still running and is known as the longest running sitcoms in college history.

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Sports

Recently I had the chance to check out 2 episodes of the upcoming web-based comedy series House Husbands, not to be confused with the reality show House Husbands of Hollywood currently airing on the Fox Reality Channel.  The basic premise of the show goes like this – Brian, played by Jeff Witzke shows up for work one day, only to be most unceremoniously laid-off from his job. Upon finding this out he does what any guy would do and calls up his two best friends Mark(a stay at home dad-played by Michael Cotter) and Tommy(who just likes to stay home and play Halo 3-played by Darren O’Hare) for a bit of comfort and a bite to eat. At that fateful meal he decides that he is not going to tell his wife that he has been laid-off, out of fear of what might happen to him. He also decides, because he has 6 months of severance pay and finding a job in the current economic climate maybe a bit difficult that he is going to spend that time hanging out with his friends and seeing what is on the other side of the looking glass.

House Husbands follows this geeky trio as they roam the female dominated world of domestic engineering and yes, hilarity does indeed ensue. One thing I immediately noticed about the show was the focus on a demographic other than the 18-24 year old, which I found very refreshing. All the characters are seem to be comfortably married and some with kids, yet they still play videogames and make Star Wars references. It was nice to be watching characters not only could I identify with, but whom I could see myself in some of the same situations.  One scene that really kind of stood out to me was, Brian and Tommy who are waiting for Mark while he visits a pre-school are having a lightsaber duel using iPhones and the Lightsaber app outside in the parking lot. I am over 30, and yes I have done this.

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Heroes premiered it’s 4^th season Monday night, and while I sat there passively watching, I felt much like you do when you have decided you have broken up with someone, but you still show up to their birthday. Because even though you know in your heart it’s over – it’s a really crappy thing to do, breaking up with someone on their birthday. Well now that the premier is over I am taking my toothbrush and my DVDs and getting out of this relationship – while I still can hold my head up high. I’m not the only one, apparently 60% of their audience has also said, very awkwardly “It’s not you it’s me. But let’s just be friends, ok?”.  As this is like most break-ups in my life, it is a bit of a messy one. So to air my dirty laundry here are my 6 reasons why I am dumping this loser series and why you should too. Warning there are spoilers to be had.

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The cast of The Guild

Chances are, if you’re reading this blog, you have some sort of crush on Felicia Day. And you know what? That’s okay. I’m not judging you. She’s adorable in that quirky-nerdy-girl sort of way, there’s no denying that. In my opinion, her online sit-com, The Guild, is easily the most hilarious show to hit the web since Red Vs. Blue.

Seasons 1 & 2 of The Guild hits shelves September 29th, and Geekadelphia was fortunate enough to receive a copy, courtesy New Video NYC. I suppose the big question is, why buy a web TV series that you can watch for free online? I mean, The Guild in its entirety is available on their official website and on YouTube. This question is what I felt warranted a little write up about this DVD.

Aside from the ability to watch these shows in the comfort of your living room on a large television, which is a definite plus for those of us who don’t want to download episodes off Xbox Live, it’s the special features that make this DVD worth purchasing. Audition footage, interviews with the cast and the crew, and some truly hysterical, swear-loaded gag reels are just the icing on the special-feature cake. There are PDF files of the actual scripts, audio commentaries of Day and the cast… there’s just a wealth of entertainment here, giving you a few more hours of enjoyment out of a web series that only has 3 to 7 minute episodes. And that’s impressive.

On another random note, while looking for images to go along with this post, I stumbled across The Guild’s Flickr page. It’s full of behind the scenes photographs, pictures of the cast cosplayed as their in-game characters, and even some of Bladezz’ “modeling” photography. Way too funny. Have a look.

When the DVD hits shelves, it’ll run you about $20, and preordered off Amazon, $15. Worth the price. Go pick it up.